Culture Shock
by Desktop Warrior
Summary: In every single school I've ever taught at, there is that one student whom you will remember for the rest of your life for their sheer intractability and refusal to make a class they don't like even slightly more bearable for themselves, their classmates, and (unfortunately for me) their teacher. WARNING: Self-insert.


**A/N:** For this challenge, I was required to select the worst fanfic trope I could think of and write a decent story around it. I selected the 'Self Insert Fic' trope since most stories I've heard of or read with SIs are often abysmal in the best of circumstances. While it's meant to poke fun at the SI genre, I really wanted to do something more with this story. Not because I think my own person, as I am, adds something to the Ao no Exorcist universe. But because the idea itself is quite meaningful to me and possibly my own career path; what better way to express it than through my favourite series?

**DISCLAIMER:** My SI has indeed undergone elaboration. I am not a teacher, nor have I taken part in the JET Programme or similar associations which aim to bring English teachers to Japan. Everything in this story has been gleaned from teacher friends' experiences, what I've heard about exchange programs to Japan, and my own research in the Japanese secondary education system. This story is not to be understood as fact.

Submitted for the **Fanfic Trope** Challenge, part of the RLt's Green Room event. Details for this challenge may be found at The Reviews Lounge, Too forum, under the thread Fall Event: The RLt Green Room.

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**Culture Shock**

Go to Japan and teach English, they said. Experience a new culture, they said.

I think it was a good idea to do some research beforehand so I knew what to expect. But what no one ever tells you about going to a country with a radically different language and culture is that every day is going to be one long round of culture shocks. Look, I'm open-minded, true enough, but at the end of the day, I'm just one of millions of average Anglophone North Americans. I'm set in my ways, no matter how much I might stamp my feet, insisting that my true home is 'kawaii Nihon desu~'

It isn't.

To be fair, I was lucky. The teaching program put me in an international high school, True Cross Academy. Now, I know some people might think religion is a despicable evil, and how dare I stoop so low as to work for bigots, blah blah blah. But the people at TCA are pretty chill. The school's run by the Order of the True Cross, originally a group of Catholic warrior-monks who operated during the Crusades. Now, they're pretty secular, maintaining their name because of prestige or something. Whatever. You take what you can get in this economy, and you thank your lucky stars.

Just keep in mind that, as far as TCA's Japan campus is concerned, 'international' is definitely a misnomer. Sure, they accept students from all over the world…as long as they're fluent in Japanese and willing to put up with a Japanese curriculum, the product of a Japanese environment which is dominated, of course, by a Japanese mindset.

(That means people see things differently here than they do back home, in case it wasn't clear.)

It's not like anyone was unfriendly to me. My fellow staff members were all unfailingly polite. But it was like the little things all got together to conspire against me. A door I needed to be open was closed. The only printer working after that power failure in the teachers' lounge was reserved for the older teachers' use (oh, yeah, there are even ranks among teachers, and you call a teacher who's been at it longer than you 'senpai' or else). I missed a staff meeting that no one told me about because apparently it hadn't needed to be said or something.

Hey, I'm just grateful I had an apartment on campus and didn't need to take public transit regularly. My experiences with it don't bear recounting.

As a teacher, though, the biggest fallacy I have ever heard is that Japanese students are all respectful, obedient, quiet little angels, even in high school.

Buddy boy, high school students are high school students, no matter what part of the world you're in.

Oh, most of them are decent kids. Maybe they showed a little more interest in me than in other teachers because knowing English is considered 'cool' among the younger generation. But it's not like I was suddenly Mr. Popular just because I came from a different country. It didn't take me any less time to quiet down a roomful of noisy Japanese kids than it did at any high school back home.

I know teachers aren't supposed to have favourites, but I can't deny that I get along better with some students than with others. It makes sense, really: they're people, too, and you simply don't see all people the exact same way. Moriyama Shiemi wasn't my best student. But she stood out because of her boundless enthusiasm. No matter how badly she did on a test or assignment, she'd get right back up and try ten times harder next time. And she was always curious to learn more. Regardless of the laughs it gave me later, I was glad to hear her ask me if I was energetic today when she'd meant to say "How are you?" Japanese don't ask how you're doing. It's just a different language that way.

Among my other students, there was Renzou (I'd insisted that we use first names in my classes to help break the ice), who'd dyed his hair bubblegum pink and was more interested in learning pick-up lines than anything useful. I had to send him to the headmaster's office when he said the f-word out loud in my class once. His friend Ryuuji, despite the wild hair and piercings, refused to be anything other than loudly deferential. The third in their trio, petit Konekomaru, was never without a smile, even though English was harder for him than most. There was Izumo, who treated her peers with disdain but didn't seem to care one way or the other where teachers were concerned. And finally, there was her one friend, quiet and unassuming Noriko.

And my trouble student. In every single school I've ever taught at, there is that one student whom you will remember for the rest of your life for their sheer intractability and refusal to make a class they don't like even slightly more bearable for themselves, their classmates, and (unfortunately for me) their teacher.

Okumura Rin isn't your traditional troublemaker. He's not even a bad kid, really. Aside from his long, unkempt hair and crude language, there's really nothing about him that screams 'delinquent.' Ironically, when I have to get the rest of the class to quiet down, he's the only one who isn't talking in the first place. If he cleaned up his act a bit, I think he'd get far in life.

But he makes it clear from the get-go that he doesn't care for my class and wouldn't be here if he had a choice. Every single class, I have to rap on his desk to wake him up, upon which he usually mumbles "Sukiyaki!" or some other inane thing, drawing derisive laughter from the rest of the class. Half the time, he forgets his book. Or his pen. Or paper.

"Asuka." I call on Rin's neighbour for what must be the hundredth time this year. "Would you be so kind as to lend Rin your pen for this class?"

"Yes, sensei," she answers dully. Without even looking at Rin, she holds out her pen to him.

"Tha-" Rin starts.

"Just keep it," says Asuka. "You're going to forget your pen tomorrow again, anyway." More laughter from the class. Rin indignantly insists that he won't forget tomorrow. Man, he acts like someone half his age sometimes.

Don't get me started on his grades. I don't have time to go out for _sake_ tonight.

When he gets a zero on our second test, I've decided that enough is enough. The Japanese school system doesn't like teachers getting directly involved with the academics of a specific student. It's the student and their family who are supposed to work through it together. At that moment, I don't particularly give a damn. No student of mine is going to fail English as long as I teach it.

I call him in to talk after school. He's downcast, his shoulders hunched. Well, at least he has the decency to look embarrassed. We talk a bit about his performance in my class. He's curt with me, picking his nose or scratching his head while he mutters one-word replies. Though he's not trying to be disrespectful. It's just how he is under pressure, from what I've seen. Still.

"Rin, if you don't understand something in my class, you have to tell me." I may as well be talking to a brick wall, for all the reaction I get.

"S-sure…" he mutters, twiddling his thumbs. "Look, uh, I need to get home now."

"Not so fast." I motion to him to sit back down. I look him squarely in the eye. He needs to understand how serious I am, or he won't respect me. "I want to help you, Rin. Really. I understand that you're not interested in school. But sometimes, we have to do things we don't like in order to move forward. Life's not all fun and games."

He wrinkles his nose. "Geez, I get that already!" he protests. "Now can I just go? The cram school starts soon, and we've got a lot of demons to-" He stops, as if he's said something he wasn't supposed to. "I mean, we've got a demon ton of work to do!"

I'd never heard _that_ turn of phrase before. Whatever. "I'm not going to keep you long, and I'll give you a note saying you were with me," I assure him. "What I want to know is, when's a good time for after-school tutoring? Do you take more English at the cram school?"

"What?" For a moment, he looks stunned. "No, no, there's no English there. Look, I'll be fine. I'll just…study harder."

I shake my head and sigh. It's sad just how hard this kid makes it on both of us. Instead of trying to deal with his issues, he pretends they're not important and runs away. Hell, it's not even about the grades. It's that he could learn so much more, and even come to tolerate our classes, if he'd just put in some effort. I tell him that.

"And what do you want me to do, huh?" he shouts, his previous show of indifference melting away. He's close to tears now. "I'm an idiot, okay? All I can do is just keep moving forward."

"You are not an idiot," I say clearly, clasping my hands together. "I've listened to you talk in class. You don't have any problems with your vocabulary and pronunciation, even if you mix the words up sometimes. That's okay. It happens to me, too."

He frowns, his breathing steadying as he sits back down and twiddles his thumbs again. Not out of boredom. He's thinking.

"The…letters are hard for me," he admits. "They all look the same, and you guys don't write in syllab- syllabus like we do."

"Syllables," I correct him. "Japanese is a syl-la-bic language. English is pho-ne-tic. I enunciate the two words, and he mouths them to himself, getting a feel for them.

"I have trouble with Japanese sometimes myself, too," I say, trying to make him feel better. "Japanese have three alphabets, and a lot of the characters look the same. I still trip up over some of the kanji."

Rin blinks at me and suddenly brings his shoulders close to him. Looking at the floor, he murmurs something incomprehensible.

"Come again?"

"I can't read most kanji, either."

He was kidding, right? Back when I was training for this program, they'd told us that Japanese high school kids would know about 1800 kanji, or Chinese characters. That was supposed to make us feel less challenged: if even kids could memorize these symbols, how hard could it be for our group of twenty-somethings? Our kanji practice sessions had been gruelling, but I'd soon been able to recognize and write most of the characters and understand when to use the different pronunciations. It wasn't conceptually hard, but took a lot of practice for a non-native speaker.

"I see," I said, more to give some kind of response than anything. I didn't know what response would be appropriate. However, something I'd encountered during training was creeping out of the recesses of my mind. "You don't like reading, do you, Rin?"

"Oh, uh, well…" The question caught him off guard. He blushed. "I read manga. Does that count?"

"Hmm." As far as Japanese literature went, manga were probably the simplest, barring children's books. It helped that pictures were the highlight there, telling a story both through image and text.

If he was having trouble with more advanced concepts in his native language, though, how much harder must it be for him to have to learn a language as different as English?

"Do you think you'd read more if books were more interesting?" I ask. "If they were easier?"

"I…well…" He mulled over his answer. "Only if they were as interesting as manga," he said. At least he was honest. "I'm not interested in schoolwork."

I sighed, suppressing the ever-present urge to rant about educational systems and indoctrination as opposed to learning. Rin didn't need that. He needed something positive. (Not to mention that common sense dictates you don't slander your employer to your students unless you want to find yourself out of work.)

Privately, I was going to have a word with the headmaster about Rin's case. Johann Faust the Fifth (I know, right?) was a bit of a weirdo, but I was sure he'd at least listen to what I had to say. In the meantime…

"Tell you what, Rin. I'll make an exception and let you retake the last test. I can only give you half the marks for it, but it'll still help to keep you from failing. In the meantime, do you have a free half hour sometime in the week?"

"Um…Mondays and Thursdays. Wait, are you really going to help me?"

His earnest tone surprised me. Why did he say that like no one had ever done that for him before?

"Of course I will," I said. I put on my 'stern' face again. Don't ever let your students forget that you're the teacher. "In return, I expect you to give it your all, Rin. Listen to the study tapes I handed out at the beginning of the year." Knowing Rin, those were probably sitting in some long-forgotten corner of his room, gathering dust and cobwebs. "And if you don't understand something, _ask me._" I emphasized the last two words. "I can help you, but in the end, you're in charge."

There was no fiddling or twitching from him now. He was really listening. "I promise," he said solemnly. He smiled then, a genuine smile, and I knew then that I'd started getting through to him.

"Sensei…thank you!" He rose and bowed.

"Take care, Rin."

What did I tell you? Not a bad kid at all.


End file.
